Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/9

 ,—From your letter to the Secretary of the Reform League, which was read at the Reform demonstration on Primrose Hill, along with one from Mr. Bright of a rather incendiary cast, I infer that you go heartily along with the member for Birmingham in his present policy. Widely as you differ, on many questions, from the Americanised section of the Liberal party of which he is the sole leader, you have joined that small but energetic faction in supporting a Reform Bill, founded on those Democratic principles to which Mr. Fox so unwisely gave his adhesion, during the Revolution fever of 1789, and with which the followers of Mr. Fox have been playing fast and loose ever since that memorable era. In taking this course, which is certainly not the one that Philosophical Radicalism had a right to expect from the author of "Considerations on Representative Government," you have been actuated, no doubt, by a wish to get rid of a troublesome question, in order that the way may be opened up for settling those practical measures of sanitary, social, and educational  reform which the wants and privations of the poorer classes most imperatively demand. Another reason, probably, was the conviction, that neither the House of Commons nor the London daily press (which is the breath of its nostrils), is